Wallace Stegner on the Western U.S.

From Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Born in 1909, Stegner wrote it in 1954.

p.214:

A firmly fixed pattern of settlement, of which the rectangular surveys and the traditional quarter-section of land were only outward manifestations, though in some ways determining ones, began to meet on the Great Plains conditions that could not be stretched or lopped to fit Procrustes' bed. A mode of life that despite varying soils and a transition from woods to prairies had been essentially uniform from the east coast through Kentucky and Ohio and on to the Missouri or slightly beyond, met in the West increasingly varied topography, climate, altitudes, crops, opportunities, problems. The Middle West, geographically and socially and economically, was simple; the West was complex. Instead of the gentle roll of the great valley there were high plains, great mountain ranges, alkali valleys, dead lake bottoms, alluvial benchlands. Instead of trees or oak openings there were grasslands, badlands, timbered mountains, rain forests and rain-shadow deserts, climates that ran the scale from Vermont to the Sahara. And more important than all the variety which was hostile to a too-rigid traditional pattern was one overmastering unity, the unity of drouth. With local and minor exceptions, the lands beyond the 100th meridian received less than twenty inches of annual rainfall, and twenty inches was the minimum for unaided agriculture. That one simple fact was to be, and is still to be, more fecund of social and economic and institutional change in the West than all the acts of all the Presidents and Congresses from the Louisiana Purchase to the present.

p225:

Where water was available an irrigated farm was the safest in the world, for it depended on no meteorological luck, and properly watered it had its fertilizer spread upon it naturally every year in the form of silt. One hundred and sixty acres in the arid region was utterly incapable of supporting a family without irrigation, but with irrigation it became more than one man could handle. Irrigation agriculture was intensive, it took time and care, and it produced extravagantly. Powell therefore recommended eighty acres as the homestead unit for irrigated farms. But for pasture farms he proposed units of 2560 acres, four full sections, sixteen times the normal homestead. This was calculated to shock the orthodox, and yet in making the suggestion he apologized to many of his Western friends who assured him that he had made the unit too small.

p.315:

Montana had 35,000,000 irrigable acres, 35,000,000 acres of mountains useful chiefly for their minerals and timber, and 20,000,000 acres of range. Those figures alone had profound institutional - and hence political - implications. Farmers on the irrigable acres needed to control the adjacent mountains, not merely for their timber but for their water-storage facilities, and for their potential exposure to erosion and floods and destruction of the watershed. The relations between mountains and plains wwas so close that the two should not be politically separated. And on the strength of that relationship and of the abiding importance of water ("all the great values of this territory have ultimately to be measured to you in acre feet") he made a set of proposals.

What he suggested was so radical that it could not possibly have any effect on the delegates, so rational that it could not possibly come to pass short of heaven, so intelligently reasoned from fact that it must have sounded to Montana's tradition-and-myth-bound constitution-makers like the program of a crank.

He proposed simply to organize the new state of Montana into counties whose boundaries would be established by the divisions between hydrographic basins rather than by arbitrary political lines drawn on the map. Such basins, already being plotted out in Montana as in other parts of the West by his survey crews, were natural geographical and topographical unities; they might be given political and economic unity as well. Within any drainage basin, timber, grazing, and agriculture were all tied together by the controlling element of water. Suppose local self-government were established within each basin; suppose the federal government ceded to each basin-county all the public lands within its limits; suppose water rights within those limits should be established by locally elected water-masters and enforced by local courts. That way, they could lessen and perhaps eliminate litigation, friction, water-wars, multiplying costs. If it chose, Montana could organize itself and set a pattern for all the still-forming states of the West.

[...] In Montana the race was as cussed as elsewhere. It went ahead and organized the new state according to the tried and true patterns of more than a hundred years, with county lines marking none but the political drainage basins, and county seats competitively chosen in the atmosphere of deal, coup, and horse-trade. The water that was the state's lifeblood was not neglected, but its control was left open to franchise and purchase and grab, and its management confused by four dozen illogical political dividing lines.

Review of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner

There are several reasons to read Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water: to understand why the western United States was settled the way it was (sparsely populated and always will be), for a thorough account of public corruption that discredits the very concept of government, and as an illustration of the intractable principal-agent problem in human affairs.

By the mid-19th century, it was possible to know that the western US - west of the 100th meridian - had an "inexhaustible supply of land but far too little water". Reisner writes that

"John Wesley Powell, the first person who clearly understood this, figured that if you evenly distributed all the surface water between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is there today."

Powell thought that only a tiny proportion of western lands - closest to water sources - were suitable for agriculture. He proposed to irrigate as much as could be irrigated economically, and to redraw the western states' boundaries based on their watersheds. His proposed map is great but would never appeal to people who like straight lines. For those lands that couldn't be irrigated economically, he thought that they should either be "conserved" or grazed with cattle.

But guess who did not like that idea and wanted the land irrigated to the greatest extent possible, at public expense? The railroads, with their gigantic holdings of free land that they wanted to flip for a profit to farmers with irrigation. At the same time, people were also falling for the delusion that "rain follows the plow".

So, the lands were settled with farmers after the Bureau of Reclamation built countless - many hundreds - of dams and irrigation projects. (It was called Reclamation because irrigation projects were said to "reclaim" arid lands for human use.)

There were a small number of irrigation projects that made economic sense, but they were quickly built and for decades the art of dam building consisted of political log rolling to get funding for uneconomical dams, and also various machinations to conceal from the public the fact that these projects were huge transfers of wealth from the public to farmers and construction companies in the west. Reisner says that "to a degree that is impossible for most people to fathom, water projects [were] the grease gun that lubricate[d] the nation's legislative machinery."

Even once a great many uneconomic dams had been built, there was still an institutional imperative to build more of them. The Bureau of Reclamation chief Floyd Dominy would go to the senile Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Carl Hayden's office and sit with his legislative aide to script Hayden's questions and his answers in advance of hearings. Create a bureaucracy and it never goes away.

Reading about the theft of the Owens Valley water more than a century ago, one realizes that the government has always been a wealth distribution tool for sale to the highest bidder. Corruption is nothing new. If anything, things may actually be better today because of ability of the internet to shine a light on crooked deals. There is no monopoly on information the way there was when Harry Chandler could easily fool the public with propaganda in his newspaper.

Even today, farmers in phoenix are growing hay and cotton while farmers in wetter parts of the country are being paid not to. And value investor favorite Boswell "has consistently received more money from agricultural price support programs than any other farmer in the entire nation".

By the way, the farmers who complain constantly about water (and labor) shortages are basically parasites who want something for nothing. The west's water shortages - past and present - are "the sort of shortage you expect when inexhaustible demand chases an almost free good".

I wasn't aware that "Northern Idaho is the banana belt of the Rockies - warmer than the mountains of new Mexico a thousand miles to the south, wetter than eastern Oregon and Washington to the West."

The book points out some longer term problems that we have to look forward to, unless technological ways are found to defeat them. Number one is mineral salts. The water cycle strips these from mountains via weathering and carries them to the ocean.  (In fact, the oceans are growing saltier over geologic time because of this runoff.)

What irrigation projects do is carry rainfall on a more circuitous route back to the ocean; running them through much more land as opposed to efficient drainage channels taking the path of least resistance. Along the way, quite a bit of water of lost to evaporation, obviously depending on how many times the water is diverted. That means that the salinity of the water grows, and these minerals are deposited in the land that is irrigated.

The history of irrigated desert civilizations is that irrigation is great - for a long time. You can feed more people, the oases in deserts are more difficult for enemies to approach, and the sheer numbers of people meant military power. But what always happened was that the irrigated lands eventually became too salty and had to be abandoned.

The other long term problem with dams is silt collecting in the reservoirs. The hundreds of dams built during a brief period in the 20th century will all be silting up at the same time, someday.

Maybe the most urgent potential problem mentioned in the book is one that will exist a bit east of the 100th meridian, which is not as dry in terms of rainfall as west, but more dependent on groundwater, and which has been "mining" the Ogallala aquifer for water for irrigation. As they say, "surface water can be compared with interest income, and non renewable groundwater with capital".

Meanwhile, the western states may be able to make a go of desalination, a question we've pondered in the past. Desalination cost is a function of salinity and dissolved solids, temperature (inverse), electricity cost, and technological improvements. If we ever have a breakthrough in electrical generation (fusion, 10x cheaper solar), we could create a Lake Yuma and make Arizona and Nevada lakefront without needing California to fall into the ocean!

4/5

East Asia Population Density

A correspondent writes in,

The E. Asian population density has to do with water availability. People in Bangladesh are standing in water up to their necks. Every typhoon drowns a million of them. The rivers of China stretch out from the southeast coast like the fingers of a hand. Settlement is along these river courses. The rivers rise to high, dry plateaus in the northwest. Unlike the US, China has no chain of mountains in the southeast to block rainfall.

"In California, What Price Water?"

Not very much, it looks like.

"The San Diego County Water Authority has agreed to buy at least 48,000 acre-feet of water from the plant each year for about $2,000 an acre-foot. An acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, roughly enough for two families of four for a year. [...] The price of water the authority now gets from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is about $1,000 an acre-foot."

We had looked at this a couple years ago. This negotiated water supply is higher than the best case costs that were being tossed around there. Still, having an unlimited supply from the ocean at only 2x the current cost is not exactly the end of the world.

How Much Does Water Desalination Cost?

Today, I was trying to figure out the economics of water desalination. The water bulls would have us believe that the world is running out of fresh water, and we should buy a water ETF trading at nine times book value or something. However, if water desalination is economical (or will be someday), then I don't think we need to worry as much about the supply of fresh water.

There are differing opinions regarding how far (in terms of cost per cubic meter or acre foot) desalination is from being at parity with other sources of water. Here is a review of the water desalination cost literature giving a broad overview, as of several years ago, on the cost of water desalination. One important obseration is that the cost depends on the type of feed water being desalinated: brackish water is less expensive than seawater. Also, the cost depends on the amount of dissolved solids in the water.

A couple years ago, a company called Energy Recovery Technologies said that they had desalination cost down to $0.46 per cubic meter, and was very optimistic on desalination as a water source for California:

"We demonstrated that we could now, in California, desalinate a cubic meter of water for a total of 1.58 kilowatt hours. [...] Colorado today spends about 1.9 kilowatt hours just to pump the state water around to California. In addition to that, about 1.6 kilowatt hours of additional energy is spent just to slush the Colorado River water around in California. When you look at all the energy being consumed by California today just by pumping water around, you realize that it is actually cheaper to desalinate water from the Pacific Ocean."

Another perspective, from Wikipedia,

"Desalinated water may be a solution for some water-stress regions, but not for places that are poor, deep in the interior of a continent, or at high elevation. Unfortunately, that includes some of the places with biggest water problems." and "Indeed, one needs to lift the water by 2,000 metres (6,600 ft), or transport it over more than 1,600 kilometres (990 mi) to get transport costs equal to the desalination costs. Thus, it may be more economical to transport fresh water from somewhere else than to desalinate it."

Writing about the high cost of lifting and transporting water, a Credit Bubble Stocks correspondent observes,

So it looks like California and New York City will never demand water from Lake Superior or Lake Michigan.
Arizona may be able to take a larger share of Colorado River water. Water won't be pumped over the Rockies, looks like.

I found another study that is more pessimistic about the costs of desalination. This one is interesting because it cites electricity usage figures for desalination, which seem to range from 10-20 kWh/1000 gallons of water. Also, the capital cost of the plants are around $10 million per million gallons per day. Or, $10 per daily gallon.

Another interesting idea is that you can co-locate a desalination plant with a power plant, and use the power plant's cooling water discharge as warm feed water for the desalination facility. Heated water makes desalination more efficient - the rule is a 3% decrease in energy use for each 2 degree F increase in water temperature.